


Shark Smile

by yourestuckinmyhead (a_peach_tree)



Series: a redux [1]
Category: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown - Holly Black
Genre: ((it is Gavriel after all)), Epilogue Take Two: Electric Boogaloo, F/M, Gavriel POV, four years later and I'm still a mess, it's a little kinky in the middle? fair warning, no russian literature references! be proud of my restraint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:15:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27057832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_peach_tree/pseuds/yourestuckinmyhead
Summary: It has been so long since Gavriel has been tied to time.But he will count the nights.
Relationships: Tana Bach/Gavriel | Thorn of Istra
Series: a redux [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1975201
Comments: 7
Kudos: 16





	Shark Smile

**Author's Note:**

> Here goes my 2nd attempt at an epilogue, 4 years later and I'm giving it another go.

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.” 

― **Emily Dickinson**

* * *

  
  


**_Night One_ **

  
  


“Get reading Shahrazad, you have eighty-eight nights to save my life.”

Gavriel settled in, picked up the book at the top of the pile, and said “Very well.”

  
  


**_Night Three_ **

  
  


Tana was laying on the floor, looking up at the ceiling when she interrupted their beautiful silence.

“What’s it like?” 

Tana had a lisp now, the teeth that occupied her mouth still forgein to her tongue. Her lips. _What’th it like?_ and she was so young. Gavriel remembered being seventeen. Or he remembered thinking about being seventeen, once Americans introduced him to the concept of youth, of a childhood that was precious. 

Life was so long. He no longer recalled how old he was when he died, but that was then and everything wasn't comparable. But Tana has asked him a question and he shouldn’t be thinking of this. 

“What’s what like?” Gavriel loved the novelty of talking about nothing. Loved talking about nothing while sitting in a room where no one wanted him dead, where he wanted no one dead. It was a strange bar for happiness, but it was one that he’d rarely achieved. But this, long nights with Tana while she endured the trial of her life. This was enough. 

“Being a vampire.” She said, coldly, at a distance. They leave their conversation of nothing behind. 

Still, it was too serious for him that night. “Every morning I die, and every evening I am born again, resurrected _._ ”

“Really?”

“No, it’s from _Fight Club_. Aidan mentioned it at some point. Reminded me.” And he looked at her, eyes as sincere as he could manage.

She rolled her eyes at him, and resisted a smile. “I mean it, Gavriel.”

If that's what she needed from him then, he could give it. “Becoming one is easy. It’s like...falling asleep, but it hurts. It hurts in your heart, maybe because of The Cold or because it is fighting so hard to keep you alive. I’m not sure what it is like to die of other things, but this, The Cold, I have suffered worse things. It is not a terrible end, certainly less terrible than my second one will be. After all that, it’s just...life.” 

“I guess I’d never thought of that.”

“What?”

And she looked sad, when she looked at him, “When you become a vampire you know that you’re going to die horribly. Violently.”

He paused. As a human he had known he would go from the end of a gun, or if not a gun or a knife blade then a terrible sickness. Starvation.

Murder, disease, famine, that had been the world. Becoming a vampire had not created a difference, at least in that respect. 

“Yes, well. It’s a horrible and violent life.”

He took her hand in his. 

“Life’s a bitch, and then you die. Right?” She laughed. 

“Not for us, Tana.” He grinned. “Life’s a bitch, you die, and then you keep on living.”

  
  


**_Night Fifteen_ **

  
  


“When my mom was Cold, I started having these dreams.”

Tana had taken to telling him stories, in between the Manga and phone books and torn paperback novels he read to her. It was something to fill the silence. If there was something Tana absolutely couldn’t stand, it was moments left with her own thoughts. 

“I’ve never told anyone. They felt wrong, and private. I used to dream of her and I, giving her my blood and then her biting me so I could turn, too. Us, running into the night and saying goodbye to my dad, promising Pearl we would return for her when she was older. I’d always told myself that I didn’t want to be a vampire. But I guess I sort of did, in a way.”

Dreams were careful and fragile things, breakable. Something to keep in glass cases and display. Still. She’d told him that she had always, in some incomplete and twisted way, wanted to die. 

He’d longed for that, too

He’d always been careless with his life. His fragile first one, his undead second. The mortal years had ended with suffering and destitution and pain, a desire to be pleasantly numb. So consumed with self-hatred that to hurt was enough. To be alive and festering, a relief from the constant longing for an end. 

Death would've just been another thrill, a sweet release.

Becoming the Thorn of Istra had been another death, one he had begged for on his knees. All those years with Lucien had taken its toll. They had been a mad pair, and then the worst of trios. 

Standing before the Spider, Gavriel had asked for death. 

That was what he got. 

The Thorn of Istra was something terrifying. It was a story that Vampires told themselves when they wanted to feel fear. When they wanted to remember what it was like to be alive, to live every day with the knowledge that you would die. 

He was a hunter of hunters. A weapon in the hands of a vampire king. A monster of monsters. 

A cannibalistic thing, something that hung in whispers, in shadows. 

He liked being feared, being a terrible thing. It was easier than being human, than being good, than being fully alive, or standing in a mirror, reckoning with his long list of sins.

He liked that he didn’t have to choose. That these things were decided for him. Off to Russia he went, to Portugal, to Italy, to India. He would hunt the almost vampires down, eat them whole. Torture their makers till their veins were empty, leave their headless bodies in the sun.

Gavriel remembered the days he did nothing at all, though. The empty wastes waiting for a poor soul to commit an act that deserved punishment. He had formed his own life, in those meantimes. 

In moments of remorse he craved the hunt, the violence, the death. To hold an almost corpse in his hands and whisper in its ears about what awaited it.

Empty bliss, forever torment, an empty expanse.

In moments of joy, though, he thought of evenings by a river, of daisies marked with dew drop jewels. Of Tana, a throat of rubies, a torn white dress, promises of salvation. Of needing to be saved. Worthy of the risk. 

“Would you kill me, if I asked?” 

“No, Tana. Not even if you begged.”

  
  
  


**_Night Twenty-Eight_ **

  
  


Gavriel killed eight vampires at sunset. 

His stunt at the club had set an awful sort of precedent, the new fad amongst the lowly Coldtown populace was to turn as many as there were willing. Possibly out of the hopes of achieving the strength Gavriel himself had exhibited, but most likely because it was trendy to flout the rules of their carefully established ecosystem. It was cool to not care about their precious blood supply. 

He hunted the idiotic sycophants, drank from them, and then beheaded them. It was the most alive Gavriel had felt in ages. Then he recalls the events that brought him to this town, this predicament. _This is the most alive I’ve been in a month,_ he amended to himself. 

After dealing with the mess, he returned to his home and washed off the blood. On nights he saw Tana he only drank from vampires, just in case some of it escaped his notice and she tried for a taste.

Descending the stairs was a cautious endeavor. Despite frequently checking the stream during the intermittent periods he spends above ground, he was never sure of what he might find. 

Tonight, Tana was shivering in the corner fighting to open a can of peas. 

“May I be of assistance?” He tried to not sound lecherous, but it was hard. He was a leach, after all.

Tana underhanded it and rolled her eyes at him. Still, those same eyes track the movement of his knifeblade around the rim of the can. Once it was open he walked it back over to her, careful to stay out of her arm span, and placed it on the tray they used to pass things back and forth.

She murmured her thanks once she'd eaten a few spoonfuls. He had to take away all the forks last week. Tana had (poorly) executed a plot to skewer him from across the room. It made for a very lively evening.

“How are you tonight, my love?” he asked.

Tana, quick to bite and slow to earnestness, paused in thought. “The same, I think.”

“Hm.” Gavriel sometimes regretted the camera stream that kept watch over them. He wondered what she would say if they were truly alone.

And then, she surprised him by continuing. 

“I feel like I am being swallowed up by a great pit, like I’ve spent the whole night in the snow but there’s no morning and I’m not getting any colder.” 

This was what she wanted the microphone to hear, she’d projected to the laptop feed. 

Gavriel said, only for her, “Morning will come, one day, and you’ll come in from the Cold.” 

Her eyes flickered towards his, “Either that, or it’ll burn me alive.”

  
  


**_Night Thirty-Five_ **

  
  


“Do you think I’ll make it through?” She asked. Her voice was small and doll-like in a way that did not become her.

Gavriel looked her over, her fragile pale skin and its purple bruise hue. The bloody scabs that she picked on her arms, her legs, until her nails were ragged and her skin was mottled with scars. The gnarled swathe of her arm where her mother gouged her. The strangeness of her eyes, which he’d seen flicker from brilliant pain to terrible humor. Her lips, which had graced his when they were pink and plush and chapped, are tinged plum by the Cold. 

She looked like the life was being leached out of her. And, due to the nature of the Cold, it was. 

He bent his head, “I would not claim you incapable of anything.”

She laughed, which Tana did when she was afraid. “An excellent non-answer.”

Gavriel turned his gaze towards her. Thought of her not as his love but as prey. Envisioned the virus that ran through her veins, mutating her cells, readying her body to evolve beyond the mortal. 

“You will make it through, though you will not be the same as you were.” 

She scoffed, “Should I just give in then? Let go.” 

Now it was his turn to laugh. 

“Tana, do not walk willingly into a cage just because you may be trapped later. Willing prisoners are the fools of themselves before they are the fools of others.” 

He recognized—frightfully, painfully—the irony of this judgement. 

It didn’t, however, make it untrue.

  
  


**_Night Forty-Seven_ **

  
  


The days passed by, Tana slept and Gavriel hunted only to return to her depths. She woke at sunset and the nights were filled with her cries. Her screams, her pleas for pity. 

Everything was a bargain, a game. A trick, a gambit, a play on what few emotions remain within him. 

Gavriel asked her to eat as her skin grew gray, her cheeks hollowed out, and Tana snarled and said, “if you’ll let me die.” 

But that didn’t work, it wouldn’t. He was as Cold as they came. His humanity buried so far down he had to dig to reach it. 

She gave in some nights, ate a can of cold beans and fell asleep with the dawn. Others she clawed at her arms, licked the trail of blood her nails left and looked at him with a question in her eyes. 

_Would you?_

Sometimes he wondered if she knew, somewhere underneath her suffering, that she never should’ve welcomed him in. 

He wasn’t, after all, a neutral party. 

  
  


**_Night Fifty-Nine_ **

  
  


This night was unlike those of the recent past. For one, Tana didn’t scream, or beg. She sat in her corner of filth and asked for a bucket of water and a sponge. She bathed herself for the first time in days. When she was finished the water was the color of rust. 

Blood oxidized, he remembered. Red because of iron, because of the metal that was carried in the blood. Minerals. Stone. Chemicals and electrons firing.

Humans were miraculous machines, he thought. Full of hinges and chemical changes. Batteries in meat suits, to the Galvinists. He remembered when they were performing their fantastical experiments. Holding electrodes to frog legs just to watch them twitch. 

“Gavriel?”

“Yes?”

“What are we, to each other?” 

“We are two people clinging to each other during a terrible storm.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.”

“Fine. Fine. So, what happens when the storm passes, Gavriel. When there are no more villains, when I’m no longer Cold, what are we then?”

He wanted to say _if_ , but instead he replied, “I am prepared to weather this storm for a lifetime.”

“Ha,” she held back a sob. “That's it, then.”

“As long as you can bear it, Tana. I’ll be here.”

She went back to sleep, shivering until unconscious, and even then. Her muscles convulsed.

He spent the night watchful, caught in the memory of monstrous men, cruelty, and cages.

Jumper cables attached to iron bars, open bottles of champagne, and thunderous applause as he danced. 

  
  


**_Night Eighty-Eight_ **

  
  


Tana was tense in her chains, the long bands of iron that wrap around both her arms and ankles. She hadn’t let him hold her in weeks, her canines—still elongated and as sharp as broken glass—dug into her lower lip and trickle blood into her mouth, down her chin. He sat across the basement from her. The laptop and camera were set up between them, a constant stream of chats reminding them of their silent observers. 

They both watched the livestream countdown to zero, thousands of chat lines fill the side bar. Tana, in the corner, off camera, started to sob.

Gavriel wanted to run to her, but the air was already thick with her scent. He had not left in days, and the hunger was rolling in him as it was in her. He sat and he watched and he waited. 

Tana’s weeping wails became a lullaby. He was used to this.

Eventually she hiccuped, sniffed, and fell asleep in her bed of blankets. 

Gavriel, though, remained awake.

She had long been something Other. The Cold was always here to stay. Tana’s teeth had remained fangs, deadly weapons. In the between hours he had let himself wonder what she thought might happen—if one day along this miserable journey she might wake up to them gone. That they might fall out and return human and round. As if that would not leave her different, also. That her sudden ability to regrow herself would not, in itself, prove oddity. 

Then, though, staring at her prone form, Gavriel was reminded that hope can break a person. He had given her hope of a human end, only to leave her ruined. He had led to her devastation when he had conceived a bereaved acceptance. Perhaps that was his greatest sin, forgetting her too human heart. 

To resolve it simply: She knew she would not recover, so her human heart would break. Therefore, she would have to become inhumanly human. She would have to adapt to survive this. 

  
  


**_Night Ninety-One_ **

  
  


It took three days to convince Tana to bite into his wrist, but when she finally did it felt like sin redefined. 

She drank and she drank, he wove his fingers into her matted hair. Brushed a kiss against her sweat soaked brow. 

When the room started to sway like a tree in the wind he forced her away. She choked, inhaled, likely invigorated in a way that she hadn’t felt since her descent to the underground. 

“What am I?” she gasped.

“What you’ve always been, and more.” 

She broke her chains with ease, and they ascended above ground. Tana met the night air with open eyes, a flash of her needle sharp teeth. 

Tana might have been in a holding pattern, a half step away from death, but they could be free. 

They could do whatever they wanted. 

  
  
  


**_Night One Hundred and One_ **

  
  


Tana had been out of the basement for ten days before Aidan made an appearance.

“You look ravishing,” he said upon his arrival. Didn’t even spare them a glance before proclaiming them so. Tana, Gavriel knew, was beautiful. But it was a strange and sharp beauty, all angles and harsh truths. A gemstone formed under immense grief, polished under constant friction, shaped by knife blades. She was a dangerous thing, not something that was taken. She was something that took. 

She ravished.

Tana laughed, though, more than she had in weeks. Perhaps Aidan should have returned to her sooner. He was easy company. 

Gavriel flashed his cheshire grin, tried to force a manic glee from his pores, “What’s the occasion?”

Aidan sagged against the wall, falsely aloof and oozing the worst sort of charm. That, Gavriel had thought, was why he’d originally planned on eating him. 

“A hundred and one days sounds pretty metaphorical, doesn’t it?”

Gavriel hadn’t liked the look of him, never really cared for when Aidan had thoughts. He was better empty headed, blissed out, standing pretty against some wall or pressing into whatever body he could convince to attend to his more base needs. Aidan with ideas always seemed to hurt Tana, but Gavriel had learned that was less about her and more about how little others occupied the young vampire’s thoughts. 

Tana, though, was entertained by him, and so Gavriel would bear it. 

“Metaphorical?”

Aidan looked at Gavriel with a thrill in his eyes that Gavriel saw in Tana sometimes. Impish, entirely too pleased with himself. 

“Yeah, you know. A hundred and one—”

“That’s a _thousand_ and one.”

“—Whatever! It’s a zero. Bust out of here! Go out in the world. Fight crime!” He paused, dramatic and full of flare, like he wasn’t on the begging edge of foolish. “Take me with you.”

The fog that always hung in Gavriel’s head cleared then, if only for a moment. He thought of his time as the Thorn. How he had sworn himself to a cause and found a life within it. A meaning. 

Inside the walls of Coldtown was a playground. It was a cage that he could rule, but it would only be a mirage. 

Power, real power, was waiting for him.

Power and revenge. 

Tana, however, had more substantial things on the other side. And more than a few reasons to keep the wall between them. “If I leave, I’ll want to see Pearl, and I can’t. It’s better to stay here. Contained. Pauline would want to see me, too. What if I hurt her?”

All of his plans could wait, would wait, he had forever, after all. Tana’s sister would age and die, her friend too. It was a grim thought, true. But it was their reality.

“Or,” Aidan said. “You could go Vampire hunting, and save the next little Tana who’s just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Tana wavered. 

And that was enough for Gavriel to start making plans.

  
  
  


**_Night One Hundred and Seven_ **

  
  


“You can hurt me, if you’d like.”

He’d been barricaded in a motel room for most of the day, curtains fully drawn and covered in trash bags to block out the light.

Tana, however, had returned after getting dinner under cloud cover not an hour before. It was a cruel reversal, to have her walk free while he laid in wait. A cage of sunlight was one he was glad she didn’t share, but absent minds would wander. 

Tana was still mad that he left Aidan behind. He’d presumed she’d notice that part of the escape plan, but it was a necessary one. He was a recent vampire, and a selfish one at that. He had no place in a wide world full of unwilling throats.

She glared at him, measuring. Curious. Like she wished to run a needle through his spine and examine him under a magnifying glass. Display him in a specimen case. He wouldn’t mind, if she was his jailer. She’d, at the very least, appreciate holding onto his freedom. 

“I don’t want to hurt you, Gavriel. I’m angry. That doesn’t give me reason to hurt you, physically.”

“Emotionally, then?”

“This isn’t funny.”

Her eyes were glassy, the fever that will never leave her adding to their already doll-like quality. It’d been so long since he'd met eyes that weren’t red. So long since the eyes that watched him belonged to someone he loved. 

Her gaze. 

It was a sweet bitter ache, this pain she caused in him. Gavriel often wondered if she knew the depths of her spell. Sometimes he thought she did.

“Sometimes,” he started. “In moments I am not proud of, I long for pain. I used to suffer torment so blinding that the world reduced to the—the indescribable ugliness of cannibalizing my own liver. The shattering of my bones. It was terrible, but also simple in its monstrosity.” He cocked his head to the side, “Do you understand?”

“You knew how to feel.”

“No, Tana, in the best of the worst I felt nothing at all. In the worst of the best I was fully alive.”

She always found it difficult to look at him, when he was like this. Gavriel wondered—perhaps aloud—if she realized he was aware of her discomfort with his past torture. The sadness in her eyes, the empathy, and not the fear he had come to expect in his presence. The curiosity that was buried deep down. 

That maybe Tana was a masochist too.

She spit the words out, anyway, “You want me to cut off your ears, poke out your eyes? I won’t.”

Like he hadn’t lived through that a hundred times. Like the unsettling blindness, deafness, hadn’t untethered him from reality in the worst of ways. She said it in deflecting exaggeration, he knew. She didn’t know how her words were the least of his endurances.

“Perhaps if you merely...cut me. During sex. That could be pleasurable. Perhaps, you could tie me down. Reduce my worries to you and ours,” he was trying to be charming. To distract from the friend he had purposefully abandoned in the Coldtown walls, from the life on the run she had been talked into. She knew what he was doing, but still, her pupils dilated with want. 

There was the other thing he adored: her hunger. They could find forgiveness there.

He cut open his wrist with a pocket knife, she couldn’t help but feast.

  
  


**_Night One Hundred and Fourteen_ **

  
  


Curled around Tana while she slept, it was difficult to think of her as a dangerous thing. Harder still to think about her killing hands, how she had slowly pushed the stake into Lucien’s heart. 

Deliberate, cold. She had looked his maker in the eye and unmade him. 

Gavriel listened to her heartbeat, its too slow pulse. Not the sluggish pulse of his own, but not human. Even for sleep. It crept. 

When was the last time she had feasted? 

It was hard to remember. Outside of Coldtown Gavriel had no willing bodies, but he had learned to stave off his hunger. They’d caught a vampire in nearly every destination they’d passed through, and they were dangerous things. He had drunk his fill, and so had Tana, and then they made them a bargain. 

Coldtown, or death. Only one of the four had asked to die, a middle aged man who had been caught unawares. He’d been religious, he said, once. What was left for him in this place?

Gavriel had done it gently. A quick flick of the wrist, and the poor soul was freed from his burden. Tana had asked him then, to instruct her how to kill. 

The others, though, the ones who begged for their lives, were bound in chains and sheets. Gavriel and Tana deposited them at an equipped police station, a note pinned to the front with delivery instructions and promise of a reward with the vampire's safe arrival. 

Tonight, though, Tana seemed full. Until the next night, or the next. Then, they would have to find a meal. 

Gavriel quietly hoped it was a slaughter. 

He hoped her heart would bear it. 

  
  


**_Night One Hundred and Thirty-One_ **

  
  


Gavriel convinced Tana to travel to Canada under the guise of hunting a rabid vampire. They had chased their way through cities, through filth and alleyways. Across small towns and even a sewer, where they located a vampire living among the rats, driven mad by the sunlight. 

Truthfully, he’d wanted longer nights, shorter days, and the chance to feel the cold fresh mountain air on his skin.

And Tana, alone. Tana, over him, laid out on a stolen sleeping bag under the stars, complaining about the dirt, the bugs, the lack of cushion for her knees.

Tana, fucking him, bathed in starlight.

Her hands curled around his throat while she rocked her hips against him, his own palms pressed against the ground. She’d instructed him to keep them down.

He’d managed to talk her out of her jeans, her underwear, but her thick knit sweater had stayed, obstructing his view. 

She gasped, and bore down, shuddered. 

Tana’s grip on his airway tightened, blissfully unaware of her strength, and a wonderful shock that ran through him. He thrust upwards subconsciously, and she moaned.

This, he thought, was worthy of death. 

And if this did kill him, it would be sweet. 

Tana would kill him kindly.

  
  


**_Night One Hundred and Eighty-Four_ **

  
  


“Still—”

“If or when it happens, you will not be different, Tana. I recall the sunlit days of my youth with the same fondness as my years since I’ve taken to the night. You are not lessened, you are not made more. There is an aspect to selfhood that is immutable, my darling. You are who you are.”

“Midnight—she—”

“Was overtaken with grief, and likely a subconscious disappointment that she remained herself. That was her true dream, after all. To kill off who she was, shed her human body like some snake with its skin. She woke up with a dead brother she’d killed and the realization that she was no different. Her pain remained. It is not so improbable that she went a little mad, if you consider those things.”

“ _A little mad?_ She was homicidal! She stabbed—”

“Oh, hush, Tana. You killed her, didn’t you? I think you can let such a little thing go.”

“Hardly little,” She huffed. “But fine.”

“Excellent. Now,” he gestured at the rabid vampire tied up between them, “kill this gentleman like I taught you.”

  
  


**_Night Two Hundred and Seventy_ **

  
  


“Is any of this easier, Gavriel, being dead?”

“At first,” He sighed. “You are faster, and stronger. You feel a high from the power alone. A little numb from the grief. Then, very quickly, life just feels like life.”

  
  


**_Night Three Hundred and Nine_ **

  
  


It was inevitable that Tana would eventually be separated from him. Still, Gavriel thought, it was irritating. Worse still, it was worrying.

Something had gone wrong during the day, and she had not returned to their room that evening. He’d slunk outside as the sunset, murder on his mind and pre-emptive grief in his heart.

She would be hungry, he knew. Tana needed to drink vampire blood more and more often to keep the Cold at bay. Her body temperature was dropping. She was more and more a monster by the day.

He walked past a dive bar, one with sticky floors and low lighting. Drunken men lining the bar, smoking cigarettes while they played pool. Gavriel could see through the window that they were missing the nine ball. Gavriel wondered if they’d noticed.

He shoved the door off its hinges, the deadbolt and drop bar peeling away with it, and wandered in. Everyone was silent, though one man had picked up a shotgun.

“Any news today?” He asked the bartender. Gavriel kept his voice low, the brim of his baseball hat purposely hiding his eyes. 

The man with the gun fired, but it didn't matter. Gavriel had already made his way across the room. Being the most powerful vampire alive was such a thrilling thing.

Gavriel smiled, showed them his teeth, “A no, then?”

“What do you want?” The bartender asked. He was a young man, they were often bold. This was a world they’d grown up in, after all.

“If you knew, then you would know.” 

A vampire girl walking in the sunlight would be news. This was not an advertised kidnapping at least. He would not have to fight an army.

He left.

It had been a little foolish to assume the first building he passed would have answers, but still. It was worth a try, and he so rarely got to use theatrics these days. Tana didn’t have the patience for them.

  
  


**_Night Three Hundred and Twenty-Six_ **

  
  


The next time Gavriel saw Tana, she was walking down the middle of a dirt road too close to morning. 

Her clothes were bloodied, soaked through to her skin. He smelled her from miles away. 

“Hi Gavriel.”

“Did you kill them slowly?”

Tana threw her head back to the sky, and she cackled. Then she ran to the field and retched up stomach acid. He held back her hair. A useless gesture, caked in blood as it was. 

“You’d liked that too much,” she announced.

Gavriel hummed, rubbed her back. “What did they want?”

She flashed a weak smile, “Didn’t give them much of a chance to tell me.”

“Vampires?”

Tana sighed, “Yeah. Assumed they were waiting for you to show up. They barely tied me up, and they didn’t expect me to bite.”

“Underestimating you is the world’s mistake, Tana. You can hardly blame them.”

She spit into the dirt, and resumed her walk down the road. 

“How lucky.”

**_Night Four Hundred and Forty-Six_ **

  
  


Gavriel fucked up. 

Tana’s heartbeat had slowed not almost nothing, and so he had done the thing she’d begged him not to. Even in the feverish clutches of the Cold, she had requested one thing.

_Let me die._

But, in fairness, he had told her no. Had not promised anything besides his steadfast company. In that he had delivered.

And so, with her breath slowing and worry clutching at his chest, he had found a lone body wandering the street and not so gently requested that they bleed into a thermos.

He’d been gone a half hour, maybe, and when he got back to their room he found her choking, her lungs barely holding any air at all.

And he had not hesitated. 

She drank without question, because how many times had he fed her blood before? Why wouldn’t she trust him. 

Tana Bach looked at him with betrayal in her eyes.

Then she died. 

  
  


**_Night Four Hundred and Forty-Seven_ **

  
  


When Tana Bach rose from the dead, she did so angrily. The second she shuttered alive, she twisted her body towards him with a predator's gaze, her eyes gleaming rubies. 

She opened her mouth, adorned with blood coated teeth like blades, and said in a voice both mad and calm “I’m going to kill you.”

“Let’s not do things we regret.”

“It’s a little late for that.”

She didn’t kill him though. She did, however, drink her fill of him and vanish into the night. Leaving him alone.

  
  


**_Night Five Hundred and Eleven_ **

  
  


Tana had gone back to Coldtown. He found out later, of course, from Valentina. She’d even used Pauline in order to get a marker for herself. She always was bright.

She’d told him not to follow, and so he didn’t.

Tana Bach was alive, wandering the same planet as he was. That could be enough. 

  
  


**_Night Six Hundred and Twenty-Two_ **

  
  


He was sitting by the Mississippi when she called.

“You never said how much it hurt.” Tana’s voice was hollow through the phone. Ghostly. 

“What hurts, darling?” 

“Pearl, she’s sixteen, and Pauline is across the country. Valentina and Jameson are in their twenties. Everyone is getting older and I am the same. That _hurts_.”

“Is Aidan there?” Gavriel wasn’t sure why he wanted Aidan there, with all the trouble he’d caused. Gavriel considered that at least Tana would have him to hold, a hundred years down the line. Aidan would never change. 

Strange, that this was a comfort. 

“He’s here, but. I will watch my sister die, Gavriel. How do you stand it?”

The words were on his tongue. Empty promises, pretty words, honeysuckle lies. Tana Bach, reluctant vampire queen, would never turn her sister. Even if Pearl begged. Even if Tana wanted it for herself. 

“You don’t stand it, Tana. You let yourself go mad with it, and then the whole world is easier.”

She wept, a little. She let out a sob. “I don't want the world easier, Gavriel. I want the impossible. I want the past. I want my mom, and my sister, and Pauline and everything as it was.”

“ _So we beat on, boats against the current,_ ” He said, because his chest ached, and it was easier than telling her that he wanted everything exactly the same. A whole world doomed, just to keep her. 

“I’ll forgive you eventually, Gavriel. But not now.” She hung up the phone, and he laid down in the grass.

Thirty years ago, he had stood on this river bank and chained bricks to his ankles. He had waded into the water.

At the bottom of the river, he let himself drown. It might have been days, or weeks. He let himself go fully mad with it, filled with hope that another Thorn would have to come and end him. 

Finally, so starved he was blind with it, he walked with the bricks up to the river bank. He felt at peace, then.

He’d just decided that he would live long enough to kill Lucien, having figured out while all his recent kills had felt like ghosts. 

What did he live for, now that Lucien was dead?

So Tana could find someone familiar, whenever she needed it.

  
  


**_Night Nine Hundred and Sixty-Five_ **

  
  


“I turned Valentina,” Tana announced.

Gavriel hummed, “Did you really?”

“Yes. And I forgive you, I think. And I’m leaving Coldtown. Come get me?”

“Tana, darling, all you had ever had to do was ask.”

  
  


**_Night One Thousand and One_ **

  
  


They were sitting in a twenty-four hour diner. It was open late—the small midwestern town they were traveling through knew no fear of vampires, of what it would mean to have one arrive at their doorstep, let alone two. 

The counter had a bullet-proof window around it, the cook carried a shotgun. Gavriel could tell that they’d never been used. 

This was the world of his creation. 

Tana liked being among people, something she missed from her days in Coldtown, she’d said, was sitting around doing nothing. The rest of the country wasn’t exactly amiable to their lifestyle, it made that kind of thing difficult. 

Gavriel liked quiet nights. Wide and open spaces. 

At least they could hear the news.

The banner at the bottom of the television flashed red, _BREAKING NEWS._

“Scientists have reported that, after fifteen years of studying the Cold, the cause of both immortality and bloodlust are inherently linked as symptoms of the disease.”

“The virus interrupts cell division and halts the oxygenation process of the red blood cells. The body begins to, essentially, convert it’s basic functions to no longer need oxygen as a fuel. The degradation of cells over multiplication becomes null. They become perfect clones. You are frozen as you are, _but on top of that_ , the gene codes locked inside those cells are reprogrammed to be even stronger. The virus works as a package for this refined DNA. The initial death is the body running out of oxygen and switching to a new basic fuel. 

However, this form of immortality is dependent on access to that fuel: fresh hemoglobin for the virus to convert into new cells. The virus cannabilizes cells, so you must cannibalize others. That’s why your own blood, and animal blood for that matter, doesn’t trigger the change. 

The timeline, 88 days, is simply the virus becoming dormant. The cells recover from the rewrite attempt, and the body ‘uninstalls’ the upgrade. Flushes it from your system. Unless, for some reason, the virus has taken hold—most recently displayed in the curious documentation of Tana Bach’s condition—you're free. 

Researchers are hard at work creating a vaccine for this disease, and with this discovery we are one step closer to a world without vampires.”

Tana smiled at him, took his hand, and asked him in a voice honey sweet.

“Are you ready for the end?”

And he replied, with his too sharp teeth, “Never.”

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> hello! I wrote my last fic for this fandom a little over four years ago. I wrote that fic to get over some writers block, and it worked! I thought, maybe, anything trying once is worth trying twice, only with a little bit more intention.
> 
> I could've just kept this in my google docs until the end of days, but if being honest, I crave the dopamine hit of posting something. It has been so long! My heart aches.
> 
> pls b gentle with me
> 
> p.s. peep the new username, I'm *rebranding*!
> 
> tumblr: https://peach-tree-writing.tumblr.com


End file.
